Chile turns (far) right

Chile’s presidential election never looked like being close, and indeed it wasn’t. I said after the first round that far-right candidate José Antonio Kast would “start a strong favorite” in the runoff, and on Sunday he won it with 58.2% of the vote, a lead of rather more than two million votes over his opponent, Communist Jeannette Jara. (See official results here.)

That means that Jara picked up about 30% of the vote of candidates eliminated in the first round. Considering that none of them endorsed her, while two of the main three endorsed Kast, that’s actually not too bad. But it still represents a big shift since four years ago, when the far left’s Gabriel Boric won with 55.9%.

Turnout jumped almost thirty points, from 55.6% to 85.1%, presumably due to the reintroduction of compulsory voting, which had previously been discontinued in 2012. So much for the argument that forcing people to vote will boost moderate, mainstream candidates. (7.1% voted informal.)

Kast will take office on 11 March, giving Donald Trump another ally in South America to go with the philosophically rather different Javier Milei in neighboring Argentina. If the last couple of decades are any guide, the pendulum will soon swing back again, and next time it will probably be the left’s turn. But when governments are actively hostile to democracy, that sort of alternation in power is placed at risk.

And in another win for the right, figures are now more or less final for Honduras’s presidential election, held two weeks earlier. After the lead changed a couple of times, the Trump-endorsed Nasry Asfura, of the National Party, has prevailed with 40.5% of the vote, about 43,000 votes clear of centrist Salvador Nasralla with 39.2%.

The left’s Rixi Moncada had 19.3%, so there’s little doubt that Nasralla would have won a runoff. But since Honduras has traditionally had a rigid two-party system, nobody ever bothered to provide for such a thing.